June 29, 2007

Brendan Bolles OpenEXR plug-ins (covered in April) for reading a multi-channel EXR in AE are now 1.0. Brendan added a few more features, like storing color information, to these filters. OpenEXR Image Viewing software from ILM is also provided.

Brendan also made a similar plug-in (pictured) for Photoshop, ProEXR. which also includes an extra AE plug-in that will turn a layered EXR file into a series of source comps automatically.

Studio Daily writes that Red Giant Announces Plug-in Shipping Schedule: "Next week, three [Trapcode] plug-ins, 3D Stroke, Shine and Starshow, previously only available for After Effects, will be released for Final Cut Pro, Motion, Premiere Pro and Avid. All will support floating point capability and are available for $99 each."

Magic Bullet Looks and Instant HD are scheduled for August; in September Red Giant plans to release Trapcode Form (formerly codenamed Flux).

June 26, 2007

This is a Blinkx wall based on a search of "Chalmers Johnson." Beet.TV, which has an interview with the Blinkx CEO, mentioned Blinkx an article on the new RealPlayer:

"The videos are then organized on a desktop application. That application has a dedicated and branded search utility provided by blinkx, the fast growing video search company. This is a big breakthrough for the San Francisco-based blinkx, which is quickly expanding thanks to the proceeds of a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange. blinkx says it has indexed over 12 million hours of video."

The current Vice-President and associates have an interesting ad campaign via noise machine talking points and visuals designed to obstruct Congressional investigation and disclosure of Executive Branch activities (taught in grade schools as 'checks and balances'). Crook & Liars gives you access to some of the issues discussed on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Countdown.

June 24, 2007

Oddly, Creative Cow seems to be in the process of censoring sites, posts, and writers -- and blocking IP addresses of those who go off-script however defined. It seems they don't want to mention sites or possibly products from unapproved vendors, and filter results and postings with an internal blacklist of "enemy" sites. It's said that dvxuser.com and dvinfo.com do this too, and God knows if that's true or who else does this.

The discussion began on the AE-list; General Specialist summarized the discussion and hosts comments, and was purged from the Cow for posting about the banned sites! A very good discussion then followed in comments. Capria.TV also added reasoned discussion. The whole episode got my overactive imagination thinking of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine series, with the Creative Cow as an electronic panopticon or megamachine similar to a Sumerian temple construction by slaves surrounded by gang bosses and an army.

Someone also suggested "that ALL the content (especially the product reviews) should be taken with a major grain of salt." Well that goes for every content provider, not just the Cow, because I've witnessed a number of reviews adjusted by a star here or mouse there. I once asked why I was doing a certain feature article and was told it was a "vendor obligation piece," meaning a major advertiser wasn't getting mentioned enough and needed custom staff exposure. And that was at a good outfit. Some writers might insist they never seen such things but they have been "chosen" to do a article instead of someone else. Articles aren't really born in general staff meetings as is often claimed. Other problems with reviews is that they pay low, require expertise, and have tight deadlines, so some writers need to lean on press kits written by marketeers (who find the pay scale better than their old media jobs). It's not a total lock, but a sleaze factor can creep in at times.

Update 06-29-07: The Cow responds and along with HD for Indies tries to convince that everything's dandy with glittering generalities, but neither address issues and background discussed on the AE List and on General Specialist (the comments especially). AE has flourished with the free exchange of advice and discounts, back at least to the old AOL forum where top users and developers shared tips cooperatively, raising all boats.

'Ken Burns "developed" the effect named after him with Ed Joyce and Ed Searle of the Frame Shop, located at that time in Watertown, MA. Burns used to hang around our edit rooms learning how to handle large quantities of documentary footage. Joyce had spun off from Education Development Center when its film operation closed down. Joyce and Searle had set up an Oxberry and also had developed motion graphics techniques with computer controlled cameras. ... Ken got the credit and, eventually, the Frame Shop went bust and there are only a very few of us around to tell the tale.'

Here's some more from others in that thread:

Before The Civil War, who thought a crazy-long documentary composed of talking heads and old photographs would draw and hold such a large audience?
----He didn't invent moves on stills but as far as I know, until Burns, no one made a 9 episode, 10 hour series that was so dependent on them nor was anyone willing to linger on a specific still for the length of time Burns and his creative team employed.

I admire that he trusted that if viewers were given the right context and the opportunity to actually look at photographs and documents (without white flashes, snap zooms, swish pans, elaborate photoshopping/AE work, or even their replacement with "reenactments") the stills would sustain the viewers' interest. In my experience, most of the time, stills are seen as the thing you stick in when you don't have footage to avoid having nothing on the screen or a jumpcut.

It's not big news that online video is growing in popularity or that most popular online videos are not inspired (see the sample byThe Internet TV Charts). But help is on the way, and not just enlightened awareness through iTunes.

Update: I should add ScribeMedia, which "travels the country to capture and deliver speeches, lectures, roundtables and interviews of thoughtleaders across a broad range of subject areas that includes current events, technology, media, business, healthcare and the arts."

Meanwhile, Veoh is further refining their content delivery system. Again NewTeeVee has the summary in Veoh To Launch ‘VeohTV,’ Take on Joost. Veoh has a ton of content because it leverages other services, like YouTube, too. But they also let you publish across services and track usage.

Veoh's new player (hard to find demo here) competes with several players including, Adobe Media Player, previewed here earlier but again below (works in Firefox XP).

AMP will feature RSS feeds, custom channel branding, interactive real-time advertising overlays (NAB video), viewer tracking, custom UI inserts to create custom social networking functions among other things. Not shown is the player controls, which hopefully will be more like QuickTime than WiMP.

...from Lost Remote:"The video search company Blinkx is expected to debut a new ad network next week that uses speech recognition to target ads in video clips. With “AdHoc,” advertisers will be able to buy keywords that trigger their ads whenever those words are spoken. Not just pre-roll and mid-roll ads, Blinkx will offer lower-third ads or display ads that appear around the player. Video publishers who join the network can integrate the ad serving on their own sites.

Google and others are also working on similar technology, but it looks like Blinkx will be first to market. This is a major development in the online advertising space, and certainly worth watching very closely."

June 19, 2007

Debates on religion have been held around the country recently, including ones between Al Sharpton and neo-neo-con Christopher Hitchens (more now available from the NYPL), between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges (full A/V at Truthdig), and between Hitchens & Hedges.

June 18, 2007

"Last Friday YouTube rolled out its new on-site editing service, YouTube Remixer, powered by Adobe Premiere Express. ...YouTube Remixer is exactly the same as Photobucket’s Remixer (previous coverage here), except that Photobucket launched theirs back in February and it has far more features."

It's not nearly as good as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, and you have upload to an error prone server, but it would allow someone to make a mashup from stuff they got from the net. I remember liking Jumpcut better, but it's been awhile.

Clients might don't always understand the importance of linking comments to movie times! Adobe's Clip Notes is useful for annotation of comments but people I know find QT Movie NoteTaker (Mac/Win) easier. It opens anything QuickTime can, and there's no need "doing window burns, waiting hours for renders, making DVDs, spending hours encoding, and then there’s the hassle of the review process -- having to continually hit pause on a DVD remote and write down the timecode you see on the screen."

If you just want to share a few files and use those annotations programs -- and don't have the budget for a service or webspace to store them -- you could also use file sharing services like Xdrive, SeeFile, and YouSendIt, although privacy terms may vary. It's also possible to make videos private at video sharing sites like YouTube.

June 12, 2007

Bob Donlon shows how he animated a bird extracted from a still in Photo 2 Life. He might have used new tools in Photoshop: see Russell Brown's tips on the new Quick Select, Refine Edge, and Clone Source features. Bob also dropped the news that the PuppetTool will ship in a few weeks, which seemed likely now that you can order the Adobe Master Collection.

"...the new Vidmetrix system tracks the views and interactions viewers are having with videos on the web...visualizing the traffic your videos are getting over time. The tool is best for videomakers who have content scattered across a variety of sites...you can track any videos (not just your own) so it’s also useful to see how popular videos 'go viral.'"

Searching and keeping track of online video is crazy, but Online Video Guide gives it a shot.

Adobe apps have a Help system, but there's also web versions called LiveDocs that give you Help as well as a list of resources and new features. To find them just go to the Help Resource Center, pick an app, then click on LiveDocs. The advantage of these is they are continually refined and updated by Adobe. Also, when you're at a LiveDocs site, like the one for AE8, you can easily Go to the Photoshop LiveDoc via the pulldown menu in the left pane.

Incidentally, you can suggest revisions or just add information on any of the topics by posting comments directly onto the LiveDocs pages.

I wanted to check out the new YouTube embed player, where the menu button reveals a Dock-like UI for related movies. So here are video demos of Chladni (intense example here) and cymatic patterns showing how a sound vibration effects media (powders) through a substrate. The form the sound takes depends on the nature of the media and reveals the nodal structure of the substrate from which particular tones emerge. Chladni patterns are still used in in musical instrument research; the best cymatics examples don't seem to be on the web right now, except a sample of Han Jenny at bottom.

Aanarav Sareen and Jacob Rosenberg are re-launching the Premiere Pro User Group, this time in Los Angles and New York City. If you are in the NYC area, join them for the first meeting on Tuesday June 26.

June 11, 2007

If you don't have the Trapcode filters, several built-in AE filters let you do custom particles based on other layers in your comp, if you consider Foam, Radio Waves, and the like particle generators. The Genesis Project shares a CC Particle World example project and gives you the project. Particle World and CC Particle Systems II are both way faster than Particle Playground (there are several Creative Cow tutorials for PP), but it's still faster to pre-render the custom layer down to near the size of the particles.

June 7, 2007

I'm still trying to ignore Google StreetView, so here's this from CGIndia, a nice resource for 3D and related news:

There's now a Photoshop CS3 Extended plug-in for the Google 3D Warehouse (SketchUp models), enabling Photoshop CS3 Extended users to take further the toolset for editing 3D content. With the plug-in, users will be able to query and download free 3D content from the Google 3D Warehouse, Google’s free online repository for 3D models and content, directly within Photoshop CS3 Extended. 3D Content then can be placed, manipulated and used in composites with the new 3D tools in Photoshop CS3 Extended. The plug-in is available for from Adobe Labs.

June 5, 2007

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush...Photoshop CS3 isn't a wonder at video quite yet! To apply a filter to all the frames of a video clip you have to convert the layer to a Smart Object, Filter>Convert to Smart Filter does the trick. Now an applied filter works on all frames.

The saved file will play inside of Photoshop CS3 but not in AE8, at least with the beta version. To see more than frame 1, you can then Save to Web for animated gif exports (as seen here with the Negative Layer Style preset), or use File>Export>Render Video.

I'm not aware of a way to get filters to animate but Layer Styles will, and they don't have to be Smart Objects if you don't resize. Just click the layer's twirly in the Animation palette and click the Styles keyframe button, then maybe move to another time and click on a style in the Styles palette. You don't have to export/render applied Styles, just save the PSD movie clip, import into AE and animate there too.

Update: Motionworks has a video tutorial showing a method using the Filmstrip format, which I used to hate because it would get corrupted easily. Looks like it's not as fragile now.

June 4, 2007

As noted by Toolfarm and General Specialist, Paul Tursley posted a new script for transferring data from AE to Cinema 4D over at AEnhancers.com, along with an explanation of the script's group-enabled development:

"It's taken a while, but I've finally posted an update to the AEtoC4D scripts...This version exports normal AE cameras, nulls to show the position of other layers, the comp frame rate, duration and start frame. It exports the position of any 2D/3D layer, so you can export things like motion track or motion sketch data too."

A Fair(y) Use Tale, by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University, is a humorous & informative review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms (mp4 hosted at Stanford Law School).

June 2, 2007

From UC Berkeley's Webcast series, Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley Professor of Journalism, discusses his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. "What should we have for dinner? According to Michael Pollan the answer may determine our survival as a species." The first blurb on the role of corn is fascinating.